Another week, another wave of changes. From Twitter’s Red Carpet livestream to Pinterest’s artificial intelligence tool, we’ve got all the scoop to help you keep up with this ever-changing world of technologies. Blink and you might miss it!


Celebs In Real-time

Twitter’s live stream is getting the red-carpet treatment.

The social network continues to build up its repertoire of live-streams for major events, this time adding pre-show festivities for three music award shows — an opportune time to play fashion critic before the press do.

The streaming deal comes after Twitter and a major American entertainment production company teamed up to stream the Golden Globe Awards red-carpet pre-show, to which a casual 2.7 million viewers across the world tuned in to catch the A-Listers of Hollywood in all their glory.

“By offering a unique online viewing opportunity, we are able to expand the audience experience and generate deeper, more compelling conversation,” Mike Mahan, president of Dick Clark Productions, said in a statement.

Live video – it’s the future.

Pinterest Gets Smart

With 150 million users and approximately 75 billion pins on its platform, photo sharing website Pinterest is constantly thinking of ingenious ways to improve their user experience. And what could be more ingenious, and genius, than Artificial Intelligence?

The company has plans to generate a tool that utilises deep learning, which will allow pinners to search for items within an image (like a Pinterest inception), locate it, and purchase it.

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How to use the function? Simply tap a search tool that will appear in the corner of pins. From there, pinners will be able to single out a specific item of interest by drawing a box around it. Et voilà – Pinterest’s AI tool will step in to help produce the exact same item or visually similar items which users can then buy on the spot.

With such a brilliant tool, we wonder what Pinterest has up its sleeve next…

 

Copycats

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery….

After multiple attempts at cloning Snapchat Stories, Facebook is back at it again – relentless as ever. Now, for its sixteenth (yes, sixteenth) attempt at finally annihilating Snapchat off the face of the earth, Facebook is currently testing an identical Snapchat Stories-style feature.

Facebook Stories works, you guessed it, identically to Snapchat stories – photos and videos can be added to your personal “story” for your friends to see, which will disappear after 24 hours. And, also identical to Snapchat, you can add selfie filters and geofilters to photos and videos. Expect the new format to be introduced on the Facebook mobile app in the coming months!

With Instagram copying Stories last summer, and WhatsApp testing its own version of the format in November, Snapchat is probably used to being a muse for so many competitors by now…

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Real Talk

Speaking of Snapchat, the mobile app is making some nifty moves of its own.

If you haven’t yet heard of ‘fake news’ – the growing epidemic of masterfully manipulated, made-up news stories sweeping the Internet (find out all about it on our latest blog) – it’s wriggled its way onto social media platforms alike… and Snapchat isn’t having any of it.

Making edits to its guidelines in regards to Discover, it’s buzzing news service, Snapchat hopes to ensure what users are seeing on the “news” platform is actually topical, and, most importantly, real.

Good riddance to clickbait!